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Thoughts on the Yosuga no sora anime

I stand by what I said when I watched the first episode, this is interesting. The production values aren’t jaw-droppingly good, but it is definitely good enough. The soundtrack reuses only a few tracks from the game, and uses a very nice blend of piano and violin in the new tracks. The sound effects, particularly the cicadas, were pretty generic, but there isn’t exactly a need for that in this type of show. I don’t have any complaints about the voice acting either. Amatsume is squeaky, but it’s a negligible discomfort. There isn’t much place to show off animation, as there aren’t any action scenes; this is lucky, as I don’t think that they would have the budget for that. At the end of every episode, there was a short piece involving the maid. It was mostly humorous and didn’t contain the essence of what I liked about her arc in the eroge, but it, coupled with the second ending song, was definitely a effective cost-saving measure. The overall graphics of the show was pretty good, and I especially love the way they deal with sunsets.

As for the story… well…

I have always had a thing against adaptions of eroges. There were enough cases of fail for all explanations to be necessary. However, yosuga no sora did two things right. 1) Only some plot threads were kept, rather than entire conversations 2) The timeline was reset after every arc so that the guy can actually develop a proper relationship, rather than a harem. When it comes to the first thing, I’m only saying that it’s a good thing as most of the eroge was just slice of life, which is somewhat bland. Instead, they amped up he fanservice/nudity/sex. It’s pretty ironic, but the anime actually has a higher porn/plot ratio than the 18+ eroge. For instance, the scene above is like this in the game. In the anime, however, it is considerably more NSFW.While I’m not the biggest fan of this, it did provide some sources of humor and tension, so it’s all good. The drama was pretty well done, and there were some anime-original plot threads which, in my personal opinion, made the story better. Examples of this include the actions of the mother in the Amatsume arc, and the state of the inheritance, which directly affected the tone of the ending (which is much less humorous than that of the eroge).

My opinions of the characters didn’t change much from when I wrote the review of the eroge. However, Sora is a lot more psycho in the anime, and Haru is more wimpy/indecisive/creepy (when he was young)/annoying, particularly in the last few episodes. This made things better, and more interesting, in a train wreck-y kind of way.

This entire set up reminds me of Shuffle, another case where some not so awe-inspiring writing (which is considerably worse than that of yosuga no sora, btw) was packaged up with (by the definitions of some people) nice art and sold as an eroge. Just like Shuffle, this show was stripped away of much of its slice of life, and plunged in a not tasteful and deep, but still highly entertaining anime package. So, if you have no problems with explicit scenes or incest, and enjoy a heroic dose of fanservice with your drama, Yosuga no sora is a nice little short show to watch.